To celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Harry and Deb Ralston go out to dinner at the Bird Cage, a restaurant in downtown Fort Worth. Its fancy dinners are complemented by a floor show featuring a young woman on a flying trapeze, reminding Deb nostalgically of the three-ring circus she and her family visited when she was a girl. The romance of the evening is ruined, however, when the performer plummets to her death - an "accident" caused by deliberate cuts in the ropes suspending her in midair forty feet above the tables. Once again, Deb Ralston - Detective Deb Ralston - must put her personal life on hold because duty calls. Well, sort of on hold: Another murder only means this working mother must juggle taking care of the baby, the teenager, and the pit bull (not to mention the husband and the recently divorced partner, who confesses he's developed a crush on Deb) with her increasingly time-consuming and dangerous job.